Extra, Extra! Dead Space Footage

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Yikes! More Dead Space materials have oozed their way through a shattered porthole and into the innards of the internet. This clip shows much more of the game in action than we’ve seen before, and it’s all rather shooty at the beginning, causing people to cry Doom 3. But then there’s some splendid zero-g stuff towards the end, making me feel rather more engaged about it once again. My mystic journalist senses tell me this is going to be a good year for EA…

This is out on Halloween, but what are the odds that someone makes the costume for Halloween too?

Definite “The Thing” inspiration in the monster area. The third person camera really ruins the horror aspect of the game though.
More of a bog-standard shooter than a horror game, can’t say I’m surprised given the creative retardedness of major publishers today, but still disappointing…

i don’t understand why so many people dislike doom3. it is a great game for its genre, dungeon crawl fps. i have the feeling that most people expected the coming of jesus himself when doom3 was released and instead only got a good fps.

dead space looks promising, the action is doom like, the setting is system shock like. lets hope the story is also at least decent. but, hey, its ea, i am sure they will find a way to make the game bomb

Lots of lovely, well crafted ideas on display. However, the way the combat works (having to very intentionally take enemies apart) could turn out as too much of a labored and focused activity for the player. The combat seems to be quite slow to make those choices more apparent and accessible. Similarly, Bioshock had these issues. It didn’t have the best pure-shooter mechanics, but if you started playing it using the full range of abilities, you could do a lot of fun stuff.

Switching gun modes is not really the most enjoyable of core mechanics, but seems quite central to get the most out of the system. We’ll have to see if the actual interface doesn’t make choosing shot-shapes irritating, however. I think that gesture based slices may have been quite useful here – fire while turning left/right to create a horizontal slash. Fire while aiming up/down to create a vertical… and then any diagonal application of that for special shapes. Slashy gestures aren’t as nice on console as they are with a mouse, though, so it’s a tricky problem.

It’s one of those ideas which I’m sure grows and grows in your head to be this massively awesome thing, with so much possibility. It builds up momentum and excitement within a team, and feeds into everything else until it’s part of the core – you can see how the enemies are designed specifically around this idea – some with their tentacles just asking to be lopped off with a lateral blade-shot. I applaud the construction of these features around the mechanics. It seems to explain itself very well. We’ll see about the controls.

The zero gravity leaping definitely made me go “huh! Cool!” though. Really nice and simple. Just leap where you look. Opens up a lot of portal-esque puzzles.

The wall-walking looked neat, if they find some uses for it that aren’t just “Hey, now I’m on the wall.” As for the slow-moving monsters that stop in front of him while he shoots them again and again… not really all that thrilling.

Hopefully that’ll change in the game.
Looks positively unpleasent. I hope we get more exploring to do than shooting though. Shouldn’t get my hopes up probably, and not mistake this for a “-Shock” game, but still… Exploring + Horror = Me very, very pleased.

I didn’t actually mind the third-person thing, for shooting. The only worry I’ve got is that, especially in the Zero-G environments, it “Looking around” seems like it’s probably a function of turning your slowly moving character about, which makes having a good view of the room a little difficult. This might enhance the horror a LITTLE, as you’re moving around in a bit of a clunky suit and know that shit could be creeping up behind you . . . but I’d probably have to play it before I can make a proper judgement.

Wow. Not only is the camera awful, but the action is completely bereft of physicality. Dude stands and plays firing animation. Alien stands opposite and plays “flail limbs attack” animation. Repeat until one falls over. Even MMORPGs can do better than that these days.